LMU Munich Builds ARM-Based Cluster with AppleTV Devices

There has been much speculation about future ARM-based supercomputers recently. Now, researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich have built the first-ever HPC cluster from AppleTV devices.

We’ve built a small cluster of AppleTV 2 devices to evaluate energy efficient computing on ARM-powered devices,” said LMU’s Karl Fuerlinger. “If you are not familiar, the 2nd generation AppleTV (ATV2) was released last fall and has essentially the same hardware as the 1st generation iPad (Apple A4 SoC with a Cortex-A8 CPU and a PowerVR GPU). The devices are small (about the size of a hockey puck) and affordable ($100 USD) so they represent an ideal starting point for an evaluation of ARM-based parallel computing.”

At tip of the hat goes out to Karl Fuerlinger for pointing us to this story. Karl went on to say that, while this project is a work-in-progress, they do have the cluster up and running MPI jobs and are benchmarking code. They plan to release a HOWTO guide and a white paper about their experiences soon. Read the full story at AppleTVcluster.com or check out the project photo gallery.

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